Senior Software Engineer; Full Stack

Who we are

4C Strategies builds organisational readiness and military training management software for clients in over 70 countries. Our flagship product, Exonaut®, is used by NATO and allied forces to plan, run and evaluate exercises in real time. Our consultants and engineers work alongside armed forces across the UK, Europe, North America and beyond to deliver training and exercise management solutions.

Much of this hasn’t been designed yet — and that’s the point. We’re building new parts of Exonaut and connecting it to a fast-growing landscape of systems (a data lakehouse, customer ERP platforms, optimisation engines, partner platforms) on one of the most significant training transformation programmes in UK defence, and a lot of the hard problems are still open. We want a senior full stack engineer who’s energised by that kind of ambiguity: someone who can take a vaguely‑defined need, work with the team to figure out the right shape, and build it end‑to‑end — from the user interface down to the data layer.

• Build Exonaut end‑to‑end — the user‑facing screens, the backend services behind them, and the data that flows through both — often from a rough idea rather than a finished spec, with maintainability, observability and security designed in from the start.
• Figure out and build how Exonaut talks to everything around it — a data lakehouse, customer ERP systems, optimisation engines and partner platforms — reading and writing data reliably across systems.
• Work across a modern full stack — a component‑based web front end, backend services built on Java, and SQL databases — alongside pipeline orchestration and transformation tooling, choosing the right tool for the problem rather than the other way round. Big parts of the stack are still ours to decide — you’ll make real architecture calls, not inherit someone else’s, so judgement and pragmatism matter more than experience with any one tool.
• Introduce event‑driven and change‑data‑capture (CDC) patterns where they help us keep data flowing in near‑real‑time across systems.
• Help raise our engineering standards around code quality, automated testing, CI/CD and observability — building the pipelines and test automation that let us ship changes safely and often, with quality and operability treated as first‑class engineering concerns, not an afterthought.
• Mentor and coach engineers across the team — not just juniors — and help grow our full stack engineering practice inside 4C.
• Extend and modify the existing Exonaut platform, building the front‑end features, backend services and APIs that connect it to surrounding systems — owning the user experience, integration contracts, performance and security.
• Work directly with stakeholders on both sides — our own project managers, designers and engineers, and the customer’s technical and non‑technical people — drawing out what’s really needed, explaining technical trade‑offs in plain language, and making sure what we build genuinely serves the people who use it.

• A capable engineer with full stack experience who has independently led substantial pieces of work — building both front‑end and backend, connecting systems together and seeing it through to production — and who still likes being close to the code.
• Comfortable building modern web front ends (a component‑based Type Script framework, specifically Angular) as well as backend services and APIs (REST and/or event‑based), and integrating with third‑party systems such as ERP platforms, data stores and external engines — with a good grasp of integration patterns, authentication and performance.
• Solid SQL and strong Java (our backend language). Comfortable with version control, code review, automated testing and CI/CD pipelines — you treat test automation and safe, repeatable delivery as part of building, not a separate phase.
• Energised rather than unsettled by ambiguity: you can pick up a new stack quickly, you’re happy to define the problem rather than only solve a specified one, and you make sound calls when requirements are still moving. We care more about that than about any specific technology you already know.
• Sound judgement…